Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age

It's an honor to be speaking at the Heritage Founda­tion, but I
confess to feeling a bit fraudulent. Heritage is home to some of
the giants in the field of family and poverty research; I'm
thinking especially of Pat Fagan and Robert Rector. I feel a little
like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. Nevertheless, I
will try to tell you what I see from those shoulders.

We've been having the wrong conversation about marriage in this
country. While we've been debating whether and how to renovate
marriage, we've been ignoring that the old institution is not only
old, but actually quite sick: sick in a way that threatens some of
our most basic values. We have been a little like doc­tors
standing above a patient, squabbling about what unit he should be
sent to without bothering to diag­nose his disease.

I'm going to begin to try to diagnose that disease by reciting a
number of key facts that most of you probably have heard
before:

Half-actually, the number is probably closer to 40 percent-of all
marriages end in divorce.

A third of children are born to mothers who are not married; the
Centers for Disease Control released a report recently showing
numbers now appear­ing to be creeping up to 37 percent and
likely to reach 40 percent in the next four or five
years.

There has been a threefold increase in the pro­portion of
children growing up in single-parent families over the last 40
years.

All of this has been widely reported, and all of it is true. It's
also gravely misleading.

In recent years researchers have begun to disaggre­gate these
numbers by income and education, and what they've found is the
following. Fifty years ago, there was not much difference in the
way high school and college-educated women went about the marriage
and baby business. Just about everyone got married before they had
their children. That began to change by around 1960 when the
percentage of unmarried women who became mothers inched up a
bit.

By the late '60s, those numbers began to march forward
dramatically, but what's striking is how dif­ferent were the
trajectories of college-educated women. College-educated women
never went in for the Murphy Brown thing; their percentages of
out-of-wedlock childbearing never rose much above 4 percent. Women
without a high school education present us with an entirely
different story. Their numbers soared.

There was a similar divergence in divorce trends. Around 1960,
Americans fell in love with divorce. Women of all sorts began
divorcing. But by 1980, the divorce rate among college-educated
women tapered off. That was not the case with their less educated
sisters. Though the rise slowed in the 1990s, their divorce rate
continues to be about twice as high.

The upshot is what I call the Marriage Gap. By 2000, only 10
percent of mothers with college degrees or more were living without
husbands. (I seem to be related to or friends with an unusual
percentage of them.) Compare that to the 36 percent of women
without a college degree. As Christopher Jencks and David Ellwood,
whose research I've relied on, con­clude, "The rise in
single-parent families is concentrat­ed among blacks and the
less educated. It hardly occurred at all among women with a college
degree."

This would all be a curious though not highly consequential
demographic fact, except for one thing: Children growing up in
single-parent families don't do as well as children of married
families. For one thing, they are far more likely to be poor.
Thirty six percent of single female-headed families, 6 per­cent
of married-couple families are in poverty. Vir­tually all-92
percent-of children whose families make over $75,000 are living
with their two par­ents. On the other end, only 20 percent of
children living under $15,000 are living with both
parents.

But it's not just poverty that is at stake here. You can control
for education, for income, for race, for number of siblings, but
children from single-parent families-both as a result of divorce
and as a result of non-marriage-are more prone to just about every
social problem in the book: school failure, delinquency, crime,
early pregnancy, emotional dif­ficulties, and a host of other
problems.

At this point, the evidence that family structure is perhaps the
greatest risk factor is so powerful that, as James Q. Wilson has
joked, even sociologists have come to believe it. Researchers have
found that sin­gle mothers tend to be less child-centered;
their chil­dren watch more TV; they don't oversee homework as
much as married mothers. The children of single mothers are less
likely to go to college, and when they do, they are less likely to
go to an elite college.

Jennifer Gerner, a Cornell professor, was puzzled some years ago
when she noticed that only about 10 percent of her students were
from divorced families. With a colleague, she went through the
numbers at other top schools: same thing. Children who did not grow
up with their two biological parents were half as likely to go to a
selective college. As adults, they earned less and had lower
occupational status. And here's the clincher: They are more likely
to become single parents themselves.

This is the meaning of my title, Marriage and Caste. We are
becoming a nation of separate and unequal families that threatens
to last into the foreseeable future. On the one hand, well-educated
women make more money. They get married, only then have their
children, and raise them with their husbands. Those children are
more likely to grow up to be well-adjust­ed, to do well in
school, to go to college, to marry and only then have children. On
the other hand, we have low-income women raising children alone who
are more likely to be low-income, to drop out of school or, if they
do make it to college, go to a less elite col­lege, and to
become single parents themselves.

Marriage, I think you can argue when you look at the numbers, now
poses an even larger social divide than race. As I said, we've been
having the wrong conversation about marriage.

In the book, I look at two questions about the Mar­riage Gap
that I want to touch on briefly. First, why does marriage make such
a difference in children's lives? And second, how did we fall into
the Marriage Gap?

The most common-sense answer to the first ques­tion-why does
marriage make such a difference for children?-is what I call the
strength in numbers thesis. Married couples have two incomes, two
sets of hands and eyes, two brains to problem-solve when Johnny has
locked his little brother in the bathroom with the water in the tub
running.

But there's a problem: Children from step families don't look a
whole lot better than those from single-mother households. Those
kids are not as likely to be poor, but they have more problems in
school, with drugs, with early sexual activity, with going to an
elite college, etc. Those kids have suffered through a divorce, but
then how do we explain the inconve­nient fact that children
living with cohabiting par­ents also enjoy few of the benefits
of intact parents?

The strength in numbers theory epitomizes a major reason we've been
having the wrong conversation about marriage. Americans in
particular think of mar­riage primarily as a relationship
between two adults. Two adults decide to make public their love and
com­mitment in a ceremony that these days makes Marie
Antoinette look like a piker. The impact of the break­down of
marriage on children-and on the rest of society-proves that it is a
great deal more than that. It is what social thinkers like to call
a social institution but that I've begun to think of as a little
like software for the human brain: It gives people megabytes of
nec­essary info about how to live.

Let me explain what I mean. Marriage exists in every known society;
it is what social scientists call a human universal. As a human
universal, it defines the rights and responsibilities of
parenthood. In addition, it has specific cultural meanings arising
out of local history, economy, religion, and ideals. American
marriage pro­grams people to organize their lives according to
a mid­dle-class life script: childhood, adolescence, and early
adulthood preparing for work through schooling, at least high
school; marriage; and only then children.

The American marriage program also carries with it a set of ideals
and beliefs that help promote our national identity: that children
need their mothers and fathers and vice versa; that children need a
great deal of nurturing; that parents need to devote
them­selves to their social and emotional and cognitive
development-what I call the Mission; that people raise their
children in a home which they will work absurd hours in order to
try to own.

Western marriage, particularly Anglo-American marriage, has always
been tied up with private prop­erty and the accumulation of
wealth. Historically, to marry, young men had to have a plot of
land to set up independent housekeeping; this was very
differ­ent from other cultures where the young couple joined
the clan and moved into the extended family home. In America,
nearly 70 percent of households own their home, and the large
majority of them are headed by married couples. In this sense, we
might think of the Marriage Gap as consisting of an unmar­ried
proletariat and married capitalists. According to a study by an
Ohio State economist comparing mar­ried couples and singles and
divorced, the average net wealth of married couples increases 16
percent a year; after 15 years, their net worth is 93 percent
higher than singles or divorced.

Let me give you an example of what happens when someone grows up
without the program, a number of whom I describe in my book. His
name is Ben, a young thirty-something African-American whom I spoke
to at America Works, a welfare-to-work program.

Seven years ago, Ben, who had never finished school and had trouble
holding down a job, had a casual affair with a Dominican woman. She
needed a place to stay, and he decided to help her out and gave her
a key, and one thing led to another. She had a child, a boy, and
Ben, remembering his mother's words-"when you make a baby, you
raise a baby"-and also remembering his rage toward his own absent
father, tried to stick around. But the rela­tionship foundered.
The couple broke up. They got together, and she became pregnant
again. They broke up. They got back together. She had another
child. Now Ben had fathered three children with a woman he had
never married and whom he not only didn't love, but also saw as an
inadequate mother.

It should be evident that Ben was no thug. Ben is a very handsome,
serious man who clearly had a sense of duty and responsibility. He
struck me as bright, though deeply troubled by the situation he had
creat­ed without meaning to. He had a dim sense of the Mission,
though between his lack of money and his tumultuous relationship
with his children's mother, he was unable to see it through very
well. He wanted to buy his kids toys-"I never had any toys as a
child," he told me-and take them to Boys Club, but his children's
mother had no interest in any of that.

I don't think the problem is simply that Ben did not marry this
woman, the mother of his children. Ben's problem started way before
he had his first child. He grew up without the program and without
the script; and without those things, Ben drifted into an
Accidental Family.

This is the situation for many single parents. When you ask a
24-year-old, low-income, single woman whether she planned to get
pregnant, what you'll frequently hear is "kinda, sorta." When I
asked the men I spoke to where they imagined themselves being in 10
years, they looked at me blankly.

What I'm suggesting is that without a program, people lose a way of
organizing their lives, a life script, a means of orienting
themselves toward the future, and a way to build wealth. It's
remarkable that only 8 percent of those who follow the script (that
is, who graduate high school) are poor; 79 per­cent of those
who do not are poor like Ben. The script is vitally important not
just for people of mar­riageable age, but for children and
adolescents. It tells them where they are going and what matters.
The pursuit of a (hopefully) permanent partner is an essential
project for the young. It forces them to try to know themselves, to
consider how they want to live, to plan their careers, to think
about how they want to build enough wealth for a comfortable life
or, if the urge is there, for penthouses and limou­sines. It
builds self-restraint and self-knowledge.

So what happened to create the Marriage Gap, to cause men like Ben
to lose any inkling of a script that might have led him to a more
stable life for their chil­dren, who might in turn have pulled
their way into the middle class? In the 1960s, Americans began a
radical, historically unique experiment. Marriage and childbearing
were really two separate life phenomena. Marriage was about adult
happiness. People started saying, "Don't stay together for the sake
of kids." Meanwhile, the question occurred to many: Why do you need
to be married when you have children?

Some people conclude from this that Americans started to lose
interest in marriage. Not really. Cen­sus Bureau numbers have
it that 90 percent of American women will marry at some point in
their lives, and close to the same percentage of men. In fact,
compared to other Westerners, Americans are marriage-nuts. Ask them
in surveys, and they say a good marriage and family life are
extremely impor­tant to them.

No, what our out-of-wedlock birth rate means is not that people
don't care about marriage; it's that they see marriage as simply a
committed adult love relationship and not an arrangement for
rearing chil­dren. You may want to get married, but that
doesn't mean you want to have children with the guy.

In other words, Americans took one of the most fundamental messages
of the marriage program- that children should be born and raised by
their two parents-and threw it into the dustbin of
history.

Very few people questioned what was happening in the early decades
of this revolution as the number of single-parent households began
to rise. Those who did, like the late Senator Daniel Moynihan in
his 1965 paper "The Negro Family," whose after­math I recount
in Chapter 3 of Marriage and Caste, learned that they were
going to be ridiculed and shunned. Even today, people are uneasy
confront­ing the problem of the separation of marriage and
childbearing with any honesty. They are willing to make education a
national good, a route to a better life, but not
marriage.

My final point is this: This lack of clarity and cul­tural
consensus about the decline of the American marriage program is a
dangerous mistake. Think of the past decades of rising divorce and
illegitimacy as a kind of natural experiment testing what happens
when you unravel the institution of marriage.

The results are now in. Changing the institu­tion-specifically,
erasing the bond between mar­riage and child rearing-leads to a
weakening of our country's ability to carry out its promise: its
promise of fairness, equality, opportunity, and pros­perity.
Instead, we see separate and unequal families as far as the eye can
see.

Kay S. Hymowitz is author of Marriage and Caste in America:
Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age (Chicago: Ivan
R. Dee, Publisher, 2006). A Senior Fellow at the Manhattan
Institute in New York City, she is also a Contributing Editor of
City Journal.

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The lack of clarity and cultural consensus about the decline ofAmerican marriage is dangerous. Erasing the bond between marriageand child rearing leads to a weakening of our country's ability tocarry out its promise: its promise of fairness, equality,opportunity, and prosperity. Instead, the result is separate andunequal families as far as the eye can see.

Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL) says it's "a great way to start the day for any conservative who wants to get America back on track."

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